Brave New Worlds

like polished wood.
    That afternoon, we had our talk. Since we'd gotten the food, it was our turn to cook lunch. So I got him away from the Boys.
    We took our soup and crackers up to the top of the mound. The mound is dug out of a small hill behind the Station. James makes it in his bulldozer, listening to Mozart. He pulls the trolleys up a long dirt ramp, and empties them, and smooths the sandstone soil over each day's addition of Stiffs. I get the feeling he thinks he works like Mozart. The mound rises up in terraces, each terrace perfectly level, its slope at the same angle as the one below it. The dirt is brick red and there are seven levels. It looks like Babylon.
    There are cameras on top, but you can see over the fence. You can see the New England forest. It looks tired and small, maybe even dusty, as if it needed someone to clean the leaves. There's another small hill. You can hear birds. Royce and I climbed up to the top, and I gathered up my nerve and said, "I really like you. "
    "Uh-huh," he said, balancing his soup, and I knew it wasn't going to work.
    Leave it, I thought, don't push, it's hard for him, he doesn't know you.
    "You come here a lot," he said. It was a statement.
    "I come here to get away. "
    Royce blew out through his nostrils: a kind of a laugh. "Get away? You know what's under your feet?"
    "Yes," I said, looking at the forest. Neither one of us wanted to sit on that red soil, even to eat the soup. I passed him his crackers, from my coat pocket.
    "So why did you pick me? Out of all the other Stiffs?"
    "I guess I just liked what I saw. "
    "Why?"
    I smiled with embarrassment at being forced to say it; it was as if there were no words for it that were not slightly wrong. "Because I guess you're kind of good-looking and I. . . just thought I would like you a lot. "
    "Because I'm black?"
    "You are black, yes. "
    "Are most of your boyfriends black?"
    Bull's-eye. That was scary. "I, uh, did go through a phase where I guess I was kind of fixated on black people. But I stopped that, I mean, I realized that what I was actually doing was depersonalizing the people I was with, which wasn't very flattering to them. But that is all over. It really isn't important to me now. "
    "So you went out and made yourself sleep with white people. " He does not, I thought, even remotely like me.
    "I found white people I liked. It didn't take much. "
    "You toe the line all the way down the line, don't you?" he said.
    I thought I didn't understand.
    "Is that why you're here?" A blank from me. "You toe the line, the right line, so you're here. "
    "Yes," I said. "In a way. Big Lou saw me on the platform, and knew me from politics. I guess you don't take much interest in politics. " I was beginning to feel like hitting back.
    "Depends on the politics," he said, briskly.
    "Well you're OK, I guess. You made it out. "
    "Out of where?"
    I just looked back at him. "Los Angeles. "
    He gave a long and very bitter sigh, mixed with a kind of chortle. "Whenever I am in this. . . situation, there is the conversation. I always end up having the same conversation. I reckon you're going to tell me I'm not black enough. "
    "You do kind of shriek I am middle class. "
    "Uh-huh. You use that word class, so that means it's not racist, right?"
    "I mean, you're being loyal to your class, to which most black people do not belong. "
    "Hey, bro', you can't fool me, we're from the same neighborhood. That sort of thing?" It was imitation ghetto. "You want somebody with beads in his hair and a beret and a semi who hates white people, but likes you because you're so upfront movement? Is that your little dream? A big bad black man?"
    I turned away from him completely.
    He said, in a very cold still voice. "Do you get off on corpses, too?"
    "This was a mistake," I said. "Let's go back. "
    "I thought you wanted to talk. "
    "Why are you doing this?"
    "Because," he said, "you are someone who takes off dead men's watches, and you look like you could have been a nice person. "
    "I am," I said, and nearly wept, "a nice person. "
    "That's what scares the shit out of me. "
    "You think I want this? You think I don't hate this?" I think that's when I threw down the soup. I grabbed him by the shirt sleeves and held him. I remember being worried about the cameras, so I kept my voice low and rapid, like it was scuttling.
    "Look, I was on the train, I was going to die, and Lou said, you can live. You can help here and live. So I did it. And I'm here. And so are